SAOC 26.

The Calendars of Ancient Egypt.

Richard A. Parker

Early in the course of Parker's work on the text volume to Medinet Habu III: The Calendar, a project upon which Dr.Harold H. Nelson and he intend to collaborate, it became evident that he could not successfully grapple with the problems of Ramses III's temple calendar without a thorough investigation into all the calendarial phenomena of ancient Egypt. Once started, his own predilection for the subject led him farther and farther, so that what was originally intended as a page or two of footnotes has grown to the proportions of the present volume. Parker demonstrates that the Egyptians had three calendars, two lunar and religious, one civil. Parker begins with a consideration of the lunar day and month, passes on to an analysis of the later lunar calendar, then discusses the probable nature of the early lunar calendar, and, finally, suggests a possible origin for the civil calendar. In three excursuses he offers solutions to various problems which arose naturally out of the calendarial material.